The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (31 page)

They winged above Tampa Bay. The waters, in the last of the sunlight, looked as if studded with diamonds. He saw the vast span of the Howard Frankland Bridge up ahead, cars like ants speeding along the whiteway.

He lit two joints and passed her one.

She smiled at him and took a big toke.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You’re going down – we’re flying pretty damned low.”

“Want to show you how pretty it can be. Then, after, we’ll get to know each other. There’s an automatic pilot, see? Nemo had it installed for me. I’m setting it now.”

They were flying at tremendous speed towards the looming bridge span.

Vincenti did not want to show his tight fright to this girl. She was truly something.

She pushed the throttle up all the way, and turned to smile at him again.

“This grass is good stuff,” she said.

He said, just to make words, “You didn’t tell me your last name.”

She stood up, stepped over, and slipped beside him. But she seemed somehow stiff and sober.

“Well, honey,” she said. “My last name’s Lucelli.” She looked straight into his eyes and ruffled the back of his hair. “I’m Nemo Lucelli’s daughter. You see, now? And you’re one of us. You know how it is, avenging a death in the family.” Excitement was in her eyes. “That’s how it is, honey – Harry Vincenti!”

He stared at her as the words registered. Fear stabbed him. He hurled her aside. She sprawled to the deck.

“Lucelli,” he heard himself say.

Tears rushed into the girl’s eyes. “I
loved
my father. But you wouldn’t dig that, you pig!” She screamed it. “He was a great, kind man. I loved him. You killed him. I’ll die for him!”

He struck her across the mouth, then whirled to look through the windshield. The bridge loomed dead ahead. He dove for the controls.

The plane smashed into the bridge and exploded with a shattering roar of flame.

Harry Vincenti crashed headlong through the windshield. He arced through the air like a limber rag doll and sprawled sliding in a bloody path in the far second lane of traffic.

He was dead before the big semi ran over him, but it didn’t really matter.

It was a cheap, frowsy hotel in a cheap shoddy neighborhood a good distance south of Hollywood Boulevard. It was standing like a tired harridan on the east side of the street so that the setting sun in the west painted its shabby brick facade the color of old blood that nobody wanted any more.

Over the entrance faded gilt lettering said “Chaple Arms,” which could have been a misspelling of “Chapel” or might be the proprietor’s name. The cars parked along the curb in front were old, worn-out models in need of polish they would never get, with dented fenders and recap tires any self-respecting junk dealer would have sneered at.

Drifting past in second gear, I watched a mangy alley cat in the doorway, licking its chops and working on a bird it had killed. That was the only visible movement, the only sign of life. It was just as much a sign of death, if you thought about it from the bird’s viewpoint: only the bird was beyond caring. The Chaple Arms didn’t seem to care, either. It was that kind of hotel. One more stain on the steps couldn’t possibly matter.

The voice on the phone that afternoon hadn’t matched any of this. Asking me to come here at six sharp, it had sounded austere and dignified, with culture and education back of it. And money. It had sounded like a lot of money.

In the private detective business you develop a sort of extra sense which reacts to subtle nuances like that. So I was disappointed when I copped a glimpse of the Chaple Arms. It wasn’t a place where money lived. Maybe it had been, once, a long time ago. Could be. But now it was a fleabag.

I looked at my strap-watch. Five of six. I drove my jalopy to the next corner and made a U-turn, wheeled back and found a berth almost directly across the street from the tawdry brick building. At three of six I ankled past the alley cat, noticed that the bird was all gone except a few wing feathers, and barged into a dingy lobby that smelled as unclean as it looked.

The linoleum on the floor was worn through in spots by the feet of trudging years, showing that it had been laid on an original installation of white tiles. There were two overstuffed chairs against the right-hand wall, as wrinkled and sagging as the bags under a sick man’s eyes, and on the left there was a short, stained marble-top counter with a desk clerk behind it, pigeonholing folded circulars into a rectangular wooden tier of square open-front letterboxes.

His black alpaca coat was shiny with age, freckled with small gray flakes the exact shade of his hair. His back was toward me and he didn’t look around when I spoke to him.

So I spoke again, louder. “Hey, you with the dandruff on your shoulders,” I said.

He kept right on stuffing circulars into pigeonholes. Then I lamped two little twisted black wires running down along his collar, and I leaned over the counter and nudged him on the spine with my forefinger. Leaning over the counter made me feel pretty sure no laundry would ever be able to take the grease stains from the front of my clothes. Touching the clerk with my finger made me feel as if I would never wash my hands clean again, no matter how much soap and water I used.

He jumped slightly and turned around, and the little twisted wires ran from a button in his ear to a black plastic box hooked heavily to his breast pocket. He had a face like crinkled parchment and eyes as sadly apologetic as a cocker spaniel’s. He jiggled something on the plastic box, a switch that clicked audibly.

“Wear a hearing aid,” he said in a powdery voice. “Generally keep it turned off to save the batteries. You scared me a rifle, poking me like that.”

“Sorry, old-timer,” I said. “Although I should think you’d be used to it if you keep your back to the customers all the time.”

“Got me a little mirror on the wall.” He jerked a thumb. “Usually watch it so’s nobody sneaks up on me, but I guess I kind of forgot this time. Preoccupied.” He let a small sigh dribble past lips as loose as dangling rubber bands. “Something I could do for you?”

“I want to see a guy that lives here – name of Fullerton. Joseph T. Fullerton.”

“Nobody sees Joseph T. Fullerton, mister. Nobody ain’t seen Joseph T. Fullerton in nine, ten years to my knowledge. Not even the maids which brush up his rooms. You prolly think I’m kidding you, but I ain’t.”

“I’ve got an appointment,” I said.

For all that meant to him he might as well have had his hearing aid switched off. “For six o’clock,” I added. “It’s six now, even up.”

“No offense, mister, but I just plain don’t believe you.”

“About it being six o’clock?”

“About you having no appointment to see Mr Fullerton. Like I said, nobody sees him. Nobody at all. He don’t allow it.”

“I’m Nick Ransom,” I said patiently, and took a card out of my wallet to prove it. I put the card on the counter. “Somebody calling himself Joseph T. Fullerton phoned me at my office this afternoon and asked me to be here at six sharp. Maybe it was a rib, but that voice didn’t sound like a practical joker’s. You might give Fullerton a jingle and check on it. That is, if there really is a Joseph T. Fullerton registered here.”

“Orders is never to disturb him under no circumstances.” With mild curiosity he read my card, his rubber-band lips moving as he spelled out the words. “Nick Ransom. Confidential Investigations. That’s be kind of a cop, wouldn’t it?”

“Private.”

He made with another dribbling sigh.

“Nothing like this ain’t never happened before since I been working here.” He moved to a small old-fashioned switchboard and peered at it, picked up a fragment of pale blue paper that had scribbling on it. “Well, I be danged. Day man must of left this for me and I never seen it when I come on duty at five. Says somebody named Nick Ransom is to be tooken straight up to Mr Fullerton.”

“Yeah,” I said. I set fire to a gasper.

*   *   *

He shook his head wearily. More dandruff snowed down on the alpaca coat’s shoulders.

“Reason I never noticed it, they ain’t been no calls go through the board since I come on shift. Danged day man shouldn’t of left it tucked behind the keys that way. He ought to of told me.”

“So now you know,” I said. “And it’s two minutes past six. I don’t like to keep a client waiting.”

“Course not. Dumb me, making you stand around.”

He hit a tap-bell under the counter. It had a clean, tinkly sound that broke across the lobby and lost itself, discouraged, against musty velour draperies on the opposite wall. There followed a whirring hiccuppy noise from somewhere in the rear, and an antique elevator creaked jerkily down an open grillwork shaft. Its wrought iron gate slid open, rattling on worn grooves, and a kid in his early twenties stepped out smartly.

“Pete,” the clerk said, “show this here gent up to Three-seventeen.”

Pete’s glimmers widened. He was a tall punk, not quite up to my six feet plus but slender and lithe and broad of shoulder in a nondescript uniform a size too small for his build. He probably had inherited it from a whole series of predecessors, but he wore it with a nice jauntiness that certainly didn’t belong in a joint like the Chaple Arms.

He had wavy brown hair and even white teeth, and an uncompromising jaw that went well with the humorous up-quirk at the corners of his lips.

“Maybe I’d better borrow that ear gadget of yours,” he said, and grinned. “I’d have sworn you said Three-seventeen.”

“I did say Three-seventeen,” the clerk told him.

“But that’s—”

“Fullerton’s, yeh. And Fullerton don’t never have no callers. He does now.”

“Right-o,” Pete said. “This way, sir.”

He led me toward the elevator.

Just as I was stepping into the cage, the clerk at the counter lifted his powdery voice.

“Hey, mister.” He beckoned me, and I went back to him. “You wouldn’t want to spare me one of them cigarettes of yours, I don’t suppose?” he said. “Not that I’m awful partial to cigarettes. Cigars is my preference, only I’m a mite strapped this week, and—”

I dug a four-bit piece out of my jeans, gave it to him. “Buy yourself a perfecto.”

“Criminity. Fifty cents! Biggest tip I taken in for more’n a year. Thanks.” He leaned forward. “Confidential, mister, the real reason I called you back, I wondered would you do me a little favor.”

“Such as?”

“If you
do
get to see Joseph T. Fullerton, I’d sure love to hear what he really looks like. Ain’t never seen him myself, and I got a bump of curiosity a mile high.”

“I’ll give you a verbal portrait,” I said, and went over to the elevator again.

The good-looking Pete clanged the door shut and pulled a rope, and the cage moved upward in little jerky bumps, like hiccups. Midway between the first and second floors I dredged out another half-dollar and spun it around my thumb.

“Speaking of Fullerton,” I said.

“Were we speaking of Mr Fullerton, sir?”

The punk quirked a smile at me.

“Discreet bellhops in a trap like this,” I said. I put away the four-bit piece and started toying with a folded dollar bill. “Been working here long, son?”

“Four years. Putting myself through college. USC.” He eyed the folded buck as we creaked past the second-floor landing. “You were asking about Fullerton?”

“Uh-huh. He’s a recluse, I gather.”

“A mild word for it. Nobody ever sees him. When the maids tidy up he hides in a sort of closet he’s got rigged as a tuckaway. The help take him his meals. I get his supper from a place around the corner and leave it in his living room.”

“But you’ve never met him?”

“I’ve talked to him through his hideaway door, is all. Third floor, sir.” He clanged the cage open and pointed. “Three-seventeen is just past that turn in the corridor.” Then, when I handed him the dollar: “Thanks, sir. Want to know something?”

“That was my last loose buck, Buster.”

He grinned. “This is for free.” The grin got turned off like a spigot. “I don’t think you’re going to like visiting Mr Fullerton. It’s a spooky experience until you get used to it. Lots of luck, sir.”

I walked along the hallway with the elevator’s ancient hesitant creaks dwindling down behind me. Presently I came to a door and bunted it with my knuckles, then stepped aside, just in case Joseph T. Fullerton happened to be the kind of hermit with homicidal eccentricities such as shooting guns through thin wooden paneling.

“Nick Ransom out here!” I said loudly. “By appointment.”

“You’re five minutes late.”

There was something vaguely familiar in this voice, a texture my subconscious mind picked up and fingered and tried to recognize. It was a voice of the same general timbre and intonation as that of the guy who had phoned me, yet different and somehow more natural, as if, over the wire, he had disguised his delivery just a little so it wouldn’t strike a responsive echo in my memory.

Now, though, he didn’t seem to care if I caught hep. It bothered me because I couldn’t place it, and for some reason I couldn’t savvy I felt a shiver crawling down my back, the way you do when you dream something not too pleasant at night.

“Come in,” it said. “It’s unlocked for you.”

I grasped the knob and it turned in my hand. I pushed on the portal but nothing happened; it didn’t give.

“Opens outward. I forgot to tell you. Special arrangement of mine. Pull.”

Whoever he was, he was no stranger to me. I combed through my mental card-index file but the thing eluded me, like trying to pin down a shadow. I pulled, and the door swung smoothly on oiled hinges. I barged into a room that had nobody in it but me, and the empty room spoke my name.

It said, “Hello, Nick. I understand you’ve quit the stunting racket and gone into private detective work,” in the voice of a man I had known a long time ago; a man buried and gone these past fourteen years or more. The empty room said, “It’s good to see you again, Nick,” and the voice belonged to a dead man.

I could remember, and see and hear it all now, those years ago – and I knew.